Yesterday and the weekend were good. More on that soon. For now, three things:

1) I either have a cold whose only symptom is a completely unreasonable amount of sneezing (no fever, headache, sore throat etc) or a rather severe and Claritin-resistant allergy to Lyon.
2) I did not get the aforementioned apartment, and have no immediately promising leads.
3) The above notwithstanding, I'm still in a solidly good mood.

And now, early bedtime.

On Thursday I went to visit my schools. I hadn't been able to get in touch with anyone before - the email address I got for one of the schools was apparently defunct, and I wasn't given anything for the second. I had phone numbers, but I'm totally at sea here when I can't avail myself of gestures and facial expressions, so I was pretty sure it would cause more confusion than enlightenment.

Getting there was kind of an adventure. Thursday was day 1 of a somewhat open-ended transit strike here, but I decided to brave it and set out anyway. It's not a full strike - apparently not everyone is part of the union, so about half the buses run and a few of the métro lines, but everything is less frequent and hugely crowded. Everything, that is, except the métro line I take: it runs exactly the same as always, for the simple reason that it has no drivers at all. That one line, and none of the others, is completely automated and doesn't even have transit employees on board as a backup plan. After DC's summer disaster this leaves me somewhat nervous, but the métro here is in much, much better repair, so it's probably fine. I guess. I don't have much choice anyway, so I'm not thinking about it too much.

To get to my schools from here I take a métro and a bus, and the bus was totally insane. To have fit any more people, some of them would have had to be crowd-surfing. On the plus side, they had just given up and turned off the ticket-taking machines, so I've been riding free for the past four days. I have no idea how long things will go on like that - apparently they're threatening to strike for 99 days, and although the strikers probably can't afford to stay completely home during that whole time, I've been told that their phase 2 consists of working half days, and staying home during rush hours for maximum inconvenience. Weirdly, no one I've talked to seems to have any idea what the strikers are demanding - if I understand correctly, the discussions happen behind closed doors, so all the public really knows is whether there are strikes or not. And of course, during the strike the schedule of what runs and when changes every single day, so you just have to check the transit site and cross your fingers that your bus isn't canceled for the day.

Eventually I made it to my main school, and wandered around until I found someone to introduce myself to. She took me to the main secretary, who is really sweet and has a great smile and spoke to me slowly and gave me some papers to fill out while she went to look for one of the English teachers. I can't remember her last name - I have it written down somewhere - but I think her first name is Patricia. Conversation moved pretty fluidly in and out of French and English, but I followed most of it pretty well. She seemed really happy to meet me and she showed me all around the school and showed me some of the powerpoint things previous assistants have done. My first day is Thursday, so earlier in the week she'll work with the kids so they have questions to ask me on the first day, about where I'm from and my hobbies etc. So that should be pretty easy and non-stressful. It sounds like there are four English teachers, so I guess I'll meet the rest sometime this week or next. I was hoping that the school had another assistant or two assigned for the other languages, but apparently I'm the only one. Still, it seems like it should work pretty well, especially if the rest of the teachers are anywhere near as nice as they ones I met.

Afterward I walked over to my 2nd school, which is about half an hour's walk away (there are buses, but it didn't seem worth it to fight my way onto one). This was a less successful visit - one English teacher was rushing out the door, and it seemed from the schedule that the one I really needed to meet had a free period, but when I went by to say hi she had a class. I left my email address with the secretary (who was just as friendly as the other and gave me a big packet of information with my name on it, so she did know who I was) but I haven't heard anything yet. Since it's not my main school, I have no idea how I'm supposed to find out when to go there - the only official instructions I've had are to turn up at my main school at 9a on October 1st, so maybe they'll have my 2nd school's schedule ready for me then, too. I can hope.

I had originally planned to meet up with a couple other assistants from the UK in the afternoon, but was foiled by the strike. My bus out to the schools left right when I expected, but that was apparently just a ploy to lull me into a false sense of security. The bus back to the city center is supposed to run every 8 minutes, but I knew things were off-kilter, so it wasn't really until 45 minutes in - when I saw the third bus pass by in the opposite direction - that I really started to get concerned. Surely they wouldn't run a bus in one direction only and just strand people, right? Right??

Well, right. It did come eventually. I managed to get the last open seat, and two stops past where I got on it was, once again, so full that they just started passing by people waiting to get on. That has to be infuriating, to wait 45 min for a bus that doesn't even stop for you. Hopefully this will end before too long. In the meantime, I seem to be less frustrated about the whole thing than most people - partly because I'm lucky enough not to have anywhere urgent to be just yet, but also because I don't mind long walks to get places. I'm getting to know the city better than I otherwise would, which I appreciate right now. I'm hoping to more or less know my way around by the time it gets cold and I'm in less of a mood to explore.

By the time I made it back downtown I was pretty hungry, so I decided to grab a "sandwich kebab" (also known in Germany as Döner). As far as I can tell, the US is the only place where "kebab" is short for "shish kebab," small pieces of meat and/or veggies on a stick. Everywhere else, kebab is meat shaved off of a huge upright cone of meat with a metal pole through the middle, which turns slowly in front of a heating element, like so (picture is not mine):

You eat it in a sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and sauce. It's kind of like a gyro, but for some reason that entirely escapes me, it's so much better. I've never had anything like it in the States and it's definitely on my list of top 10 things that are awesome about living in Europe. Side benefits are the fact that it's cheaper than any other food, kebab shops are on every corner, and they're open longer than other restaurants. All of which might help explain why I've been eating them all the time, as in sometimes more than once a day. (That having been said, I've been having mine "sans sauce" for the simple reason that I have no idea what any of the sauces are. Now that I've finally learned the French word for "spicy" and can thus ensure that I get something that isn't, I'll probably start trying them. The names are mostly in Turkish or Arabic, except one: "sauce blanche," or "white sauce." Descriptive, that.)


Friday was more apartment-hunting, and I might actually have found something. I'm going to visit it tomorrow, so I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, but it really would be perfect if it worked out. More on that later, hopefully. In the afternoon I walked over to check out its neighborhood, which is pretty nice and also right in front of a park. You have to climb a pretty steep hill, but then there are really good views. I took some pictures. (Click on them to see bigger versions.)

My new camera doesn't tell me when I've taken a blurry picture, which is a shame. Even so, I love this shot. A courtyard a few blocks away from the park.

View of the city from the top of the park.

View in a different direction. I kind of like that it's just hewn out of rock.

Apparently it has been illegal to throw projectiles onto the lower properties since March 2, 1874.

Afterward I walked over to the opera building to meet up with Hannah and Jack. After wandering around for a bit (that area of town has a truly epic number of kebab shops per capita), we wound up heading back to the same place as before on the banks of the Rhône.

But this time, I saw the elephant! In case you didn't get it before, here is a terrible explanatory drawing:

(Drinking and discussing elephants led to an attempted explanation of "seeing pink elephants," so pink seemed appropriate.) By the end of the evening Hannah was able to see it too, but Jack is still in a benighted state of elephant-denial. He'll come round eventually.

It's late, so that's it for now. Hopefully by the next time I write, I'll have a place to call home. :)

So, more catch-up:

Tuesday I mostly spent with Hannah, the German assistant. We met up with some of the other assistants in Croix-Rousse, where there's a big outdoor market. One side of the street is food, and the other side is . . everything, more or less. It's really long. I'm planning to head back there at some point and take my time there - most of it is junk, but among other things they have pretty cheap kitchen stuff, so depending on my living situation that could come in really handy.

After wandering the market and getting lunch, everyone else had places they needed to be, so Hannah and I wandered around the Croix-Rousse area a little longer and then headed back to the 9th to François' place. Neither of us had really had a chance to cook at all since getting here (she's been staying at a hotel until her new room frees up), so we headed to the supermarket and made pasta with veggies. Since he just moved, François doesn't really have much in the way of kitchen stuff, which makes me laugh because when he was at UVA he liked to talk a lot about how Americans don't cook and it's so much better in France. And now I come to France ready to cook, and he has nothing for spices except salt, pepper and parsley. Even so, it was tasty, and the three of us got along well and had a multi-lingual dinner.

There was a really funny moment when we were cleaning up afterward, and François was trying to put away the pot we had used, which he keeps on the top shelf (where I can't reach things at all). He was barely able to reach it, so Hannah said "let me - I'm taller than you" (which is true, but not by more than an inch or so). The look he gave her was priceless: almost offended, but laughing . . . but still, a little offended . . but laughing. So she goes "oh, sorry, I forgot - boys are always taller than girls." :D


After she headed home, François and I headed out to meet up with some of his friends from "cop school." There are a bunch of small boats that are permanently docked on the shore of the Rhône, and several of them are bars or restaurants or cafes. The view around there is really beautiful.


I had fun, but I think bars must be the origin of the myth that foreigners will understand you if only you shout loud enough - it was so loud there, I kept thinking that I might know what was being said if only I could hear at all. But everyone was really sweet, and I ended up talking to a girl named (I think) Mathilde, who did a year abroad in Boston during high school. We wound up talking about prom, hehe. There was also a girl named Yasmine who was really excellent at speaking slowly and using simple words to get things across to me. I really appreciated that - it's a skill of mine, when I'm speaking English to non-native speakers, but I've found that it's fairly rare, generally speaking. Most people will slow down at first, but soon they forget and speed back up again, or get bored or whatever. But she told me a really funny story about how one of the other guys they go to school with had been practicing CPR that morning, and did chest compressions so hard that he actually broke the mannequin. Hopefully I won't need CPR while I'm here . . .

Wednesday night there was a dinner party thrown by two other assistants, which was really nice of them. It was nice to get to know people a little more and to chat in English, though I know I really should stop seeking that out soon. It ended fairly early because the hosts had somewhere to be early in the morning, so four of us headed out to find somewhere to spend the evening (and drink the leftover bottle of wine our hosts had pressed on us). Me, Hannah, and then Michael (or Mickaël as he spells it when he's here, because he refuses to be "Michel") from Australia, and Bérénice from Lyon (she was a French assistant in Scotland a few years ago, and remembers that it was difficult at first, so she hangs out with the language assistants when they come here to make things a little smoother).

The riverbank in the same general area where I'd been with François and his friends the night before is a popular evening hangout, so we sat on the steps to drink our wine and chat in three languages. Michael speaks good German (and I think Bérénice does too, though I can't remember for sure) so once he realized that the rest of us did too, sticking to one language became a completely lost cause. The base language was English, but random words in every sentence kept coming out in other languages. It was really funny, and fun. I don't have all that many multilingual friends back home.

Hannah's blog is in German, but you can see some pictures here. The first one is Bérénice, then Hannah and Michael ("Kamin" means fireplace - in her blog she mentions the fact that she and Michael kept almost falling into the fire pit behind them), then all four of us, then a shot of us walking on the riverside.

A theme of the night was "seeing the elephant," and not in the metaphorical sense I've just learned about from Stryer. In the picture above, in the distance to the left of the dome, you can kind of see the cathedral Fourvière. It's tiny above, but In person you can see it really clearly. Here's a picture (which I didn't take) of it during the day:

So Michael started telling us that when he went on a tour of it, the first thing the guide said wasn't some historical fact or anything about the craftsmanship, but rather: "Everyone says it looks like an upside-down elephant." Bérénice (being from Lyon) agreed, but Hannah and I couldn't see it, and spent the rest of the evening trying to no avail to see the elephant.

Side note: On the way back to the metro (or métro if you want to be French about it), we stopped into a McDonalds to use the bathroom. Did you know that in the rest of the world, they don't pump out that awful nauseating smell?! It smelled like a normal place! It's the little things.

This is too long, so the rest is going into another entry.

In a minute I'll start catching up on the past few days, but first, a note on the much-decried "French rudeness:"

It's a lie. Here in Lyon, at least. People have been, without exception, almost unrealistically nice - and this in the face of my utter mangling of their language. They'll repeat themselves for me with a smile, or even sprinkle in some English when they have it - so in other words, it's time for me to get rid of my asinine fear of transactions that will force me to speak, because even when I sound absurd it always seems that we both end up laughing together and miming or rephrasing so that I get the thing or the information that I need. No one seems to think I'm unintelligent for not being great at French, which is the total opposite of what everyone in the US seems to expect. Seriously, people here have been so unfailingly polite and friendly that it's almost unnerving. I literally have had no bad experience yet. I'm sure that can't last, but even so, it's impressive. Moral of the story: if you speak little or no French and still want to visit the country, skip Paris and come to Lyon. :)

My French is progressing, sort of. Or my understanding of French, at least. Interactions fall into one of several categories:
- Talking with other assistants. English, minimal German (more on this later), or very very small amounts of French (generally for terms that have no English equivalent or terms to do with our jobs that we haven't really seen translated (like "arrêté," or "contract"). Not learning anything there.
- Talking one-on-one with François. Probably 90% in English and 10% French (him speaking) and 99.9% English (me speaking). His English is so, so much better than my French that we just fall into it, not least because I tend to answer in English no matter what (just for now, I swear). I should ask him to speak French with me, but I know how frustrating it has to be to talk super slowly and repeat yourself every three sentences, so I haven't yet. Plus it's hard to convince myself to work that hard when I don't have to. :P
- "Talking" with François along with his friends. 95% French and 5% English (them); 5% French, 5% English and 90% listening without talking (me). I have no idea what impression they must have of me so far, and I worry that I must seem either bored or completely at sea. I'm neither; I'm happy to listen and work out the puzzle of what's going on, but right now things are still coming out more Spanish than French and I get kind of shy saying things to a whole group.
- Talking to strangers. Virtually all French (them); virtually all "French" (me). I seem, generally speaking, to get my point across - or close enough, anyway. This could be because I steer clear of anything complicated and use the foolproof trick of paying for things with large notes (20€ on a bottle of water, for example) to mask the fact that numbers scare me. This is really the only situation in which I speak any French, for the moment, aside from talking to Anaïs or Mr. Bargel (which I haven't done in a few days now). Anaïs is going to Nice for the weekend to watch American wrestling (yes, really - she's super excited, too) but maybe I'll see if we can get lunch when she gets back.


Okay, catching up. Days have been really full, so apologies if this is long. I'll try not to be too boring.

Sunday I met up with 6 or 7 of the other language assistants who were already in town and went to the zoo (which is pretty small, but free), then to a cafe. A good time, but nothing too noteworthy; mostly trading a lot of "what's your name, where are you from, where/what did you study," but it was nice. Afterward four of us got a drink (mostly because you can't get dinner as early as 6:30p) and then dinner at an Indian place in Vieux ("Old") Lyon. Jack is from the UK and did a year abroad in Mexico, Erin is from Boston, and Hannah is from Berlin (she's teaching German).

I spent basically all of Monday on the internet, trying to find a colocation (apartment with roommates). That would definitely be the best option for me if I can swing it. I can barely afford a place even with roommates on what I'm making - we'll take home something like 780€ after taxes, and people looking for roommates are mostly advertising places between 300 and 450€. I don't even know what a studio would cost, but I'm wary of going much higher than that range, especially since I'm still hoping to travel. On top of that, if it's your name on the lease, you have to have a French guarantor - even Hannah can't use her parents, even though they're in the EU. I could ask the Bargels, probably, but I'd like to avoid that if I can.

Anyway, François still didn't have internet at that point, and since the spotty network had disappeared from his apartment entirely I wound up going down the street to a cafe called "Food and Coffee." The two guys who work there are very sweet, if somewhat baffled by my "French." They didn't seem to care at all that I stayed for hours after ordering nothing but an espresso. (Which I did with mixed success. "Espresso" I can more or less pronounce; "double espresso" remains beyond me. It either comes out too much like the English version of the word, or too much like "doble" (Spanish), or else I guess just as nonsense. Oh well, I didn't really need the extra coffee anyway.) So now I've sent messages to a pretty good number of people who have advertised on the roommate-seeking website here (appartager.fr, which is a cross between "appartement" and "partager," "to share"). So far I've only heard back about one, which I'm going to see tomorrow, but I don't think I'm likely to take it - the guy speaks English and sounded nice and not at all creepy on the phone, but (unbeknownst to me until after I agreed to come see the place) he's in his 40s and lives with his teenaged son, which seems like it could get kind of messy. It's also kind of far from where I'm working, so not really ideal. But it's affordable, and I don't really have anything to lose from looking at the place, so I probably will go (and yes, I'm going to take someone with me).

Okay, that's it for now. There's a transit strike on right now (more on that next time), so François is getting a ride to work - and has invited the guy to 7:30a breakfast. I sleep on the couch, which means tomorrow is an early morning, which makes it past my bedtime. 'Night all.

Internet has been spotty lately - François just moved and his isn't hooked up, so we've been borrowing wireless, but it only works sometimes. "Borrowing" actually isn't a euphemism - as far as I understand it, when you pay for internet at home, it automatically comes with wireless for your home. It's an open network in the sense that you don't put in a password just to connect to it, but once you're connected, the only site you can visit is the internet company's homepage. But if you're a customer of theirs, you put in your username and pword and then you have free wireless access. So it's cool because anyplace where someone or some business uses the same company, you get free access. François' parents use a company called Neuf, and so do some other people in his building, so we can get on with his parents' info. It's a weak network, though, and it seems to be completely random when we can get it and when we can't.

("Free wireless," as a concept, has not caught on here. I'm constantly seeing a network called "FreeWifi," which is a cruel joke, because "Free" is just another internet company with the same deal as above. Some coffee shops have it, but you have to ask for the password, and my French is not yet that advanced. Maybe when I get to the point of being able to order a coffee without being answered in English…)

Anyway! The last few days.

Friday was a slow day. François had class until around 4, so I slept in and repacked my bags so that the things I need immediately are mostly consolidated into one bag rather than spread across 3. (Is there any system for finding things when you're living out a suitcase that doesn't involve rummaging for five minutes every time you need something? If there is, I haven't heard of it.) I managed to miss the 2 or 3h window when cafes actually serve lunch, but I managed to order a coffee with a minimum of misunderstanding, and walked around the neighborhood a little. François doesn't really live downtown - his place is in the 9th "arrondisement" or district, if you're curious - but it's still pretty walkable, with a lot of little cafes and businesses and a big new movie theater. It's also right on the Saône (one of Lyon's two rivers, more or less rhymes with "zone") and there's kind of a tiny little park, really just a tree-lined walkway with benches. Very pretty.

After François got home we walked around a little more - I hadn't wanted to go very far on my own, since I wasn't excited about the idea of asking for directions if I got lost - and then his mom picked us up to go to their place for Anaïs' party. (Since I realize I didn't say this before, it's pronounced AH-nah-EES. Cool name.) I wound up deciding to spend most of the night upstairs, since I'm not really that good at speaking. The way my French is right now, I'm happy to listen to people talk to each other/in a group, because I'm starting to piece things together and I can pick out phrases here and there. But I think it's kind of awkward for other people when I listen without talking at all, so I didn't want to do too much of that. The only time I really managed to communicate was when this huge . . something, it looked like a bee but it was so much bigger I can't believe it was one, flew into the kitchen. We were outside since Anaïs was grilling, and anyway window screens aren't that common in France. They kept trying to chase it back out the door, but it wouldn't go, so I finally pointed out that it was probably attracted to the kitchen light, and it would be easier if they turned it off for a minute. Not that I actually said anything that complicated or correct; I think I said something much closer to "Je crois qu'il aime les luz" and pointed. "Luz," because I am awesome, is not only Spanish but also singular, and therefore neither made sense to anyone nor agreed with "les". Oh well. Hand gestures are key, which incidentally is why I'm afraid to use the phone. That's a later problem.

So Friday night I went to sleep somewhat frustrated with my inability to understand or communicate, and Saturday morning I woke up able to more or less understand things. I have no idea why. I'm still far from understanding every word or even the meaning of every sentence, but I can pretty much follow the flow of conversations now, which is a huge difference from Wednesday. The exception to this, for some unknown but really annoying reason, is that I still virtually always fail to understand questions directed at me. So I'll be following along without too much problem, until the point when it occurs to someone to ask some comprehension-checking question, at which point I say "ah…comment?" ("ah . . . how was that again?") and everyone assumes I haven't understood a word. Hopefully that won't last long.

Anaïs and their mom were out for the afternoon, so F and I ate with Mr. Bargel. Last time I visited I got almost no sense of him - my French was almost nonexistent, and I never anyway I saw him without Mrs. Bargel, so she and François and his sister Sophie did almost all the talking. This time I've talked to him much more, and I'm really glad - he's really kind, and extremely patient with my French, and he's so encouraging when I speak it that I don't really feel self-conscious. He's also probably the best at speaking slowly without forgetting and speeding up again, which I've found to be a rare skill.

In the afternoon F took me to the mall (I've established that Carrefour is not the name of the entire thing, just the huge department store) so I could get a cell phone. All the things I need to do to get established here seem to be interlocking and circular - you can't get a phone or a bank account without an address; you can't find an apartment without a phone; you can't get paid without a bank account; you can't pay for some things without a french bank card; etc. That list goes on, too - I need to hear back from my schools so I can get a form so I can apply for a medical appointment so I can validate my visa, all of which requires an address and a bank account and a phone. The phone seemed like the easiest point of entry, and we were able to just give the guy the Bargels' address. (That won't work for the bank; they'll require a letter from my landlord stating that I live at an address, and then proof that the landlord lives there, and then proof that the landlord is French). Once again, I was really grateful to have François' help. I really don't know if I would have gotten it done without him (or maybe Anaïs) to help me; I barely understood any of the questions the guy asked. There was also some confusion because European credit cards have PINs just like debit cards, and although the machine understood and printed out a receipt for me to sign, the guy had never had to ask a customer to sign a receipt before and was completely confused. (Which was slightly compounded by François' explanation that the signature has to match the signature on the back of the card, since instead of signing, I wrote "ask for ID" on mine.) He was really nice, though - so far, no one at all has been snide about my miserable French - and smiled and said the French equivalent of "Hey, I've learned something new" when we finally got the credit card thing straightened out.

So now I have a French cell phone, the number to which I'll give you on request. If you have Google voice, you can text my new phone from there, and I have free texts, so that's pretty cool. (For some reason I don't seem to be able to text American numbers unless I'm replying to a received text - I have no idea why that should be true, but there it is.)

At night François had a housewarming party at his new place, which was kind of fun. Honestly, though, I had more fun getting ready - three of his friends came over to help cook, which was much more on a manageable scale for me. One of them, Ludo, I had met when I visited a couple years ago. I remember meeting him clearly, because he looked so confused when I shook hands instead of giving the two kisses that François told him "Ah, c'est parce qu'elle est américaine" ("ah, it's because she's American") to explain my strange behavior. Of course I knew that French people kiss hello, but it hadn't occurred to me at all that not doing so would come across as rude or, at the least, strange. This time I remembered, so things got off on a much less awkward foot. He doesn't speak any English, unlike most of François and Anaïs' friends who went to college and so had to learn at least some, but he makes up for it by being quite good with pantomime and facial expressions. For some reason I'm also much less shy about trying to speak foreign languages when I know the other person couldn't much more easily slip into English, so we were able to chat a bit. A very little bit. A very little bit in which I continually had to ask him to repeat himself "plus lentement, s'il te plaît." Still, it's something, right? I suspect that being able to actually communicate with Ludo will be the true test of my French.

Eventually there were ten of us, and for the most part I slipped back into my role of relatively silent observer, but with much more of a sense of what was going on than I had the night before with Anaïs' friends. Three of the people there were from Salvador and another was also fluent in Spanish, so there was a bit of that on the side, which was a break that I very much appreciated.

Things were somewhat awkward because François invited another kid who he met at UVA, an international student from Singapore whom I had never met and who speaks virtually no French at all. He's here to take French classes, but I felt kind of bad for him last night because all the conversation was in French and I don't think he understood more than a very few things that were directed at him, very slowly and with English sprinkled in. There was a funny moment at the beginning of the night when Ludo was offering to pour people (small) glasses of apple liqueur, and this kid (whose name I never did catch) decided for some reason that he wanted some apple liqueur in his beer. With his French and Ludo's English both essentially nonexistent, there was an extended moment of "yes! pour some of it in here!" gestures from the kid and "no, there's no way on earth that's what you really want; what are you trying to tell me?" expressions from Ludo before he finally poured it, extremely tentatively and waiting every second to be stopped and told what was actually wanted. Made me laugh. I still have no idea why the UVA kid decided to ask for that, but he did seem to enjoy it, so maybe I'm missing out.

It's funny, the way my comprehension ebbs and flows right now. If I lose track of a conversation it can take a good while for me to pick back up on what's going on, but as long as I'm following the thread I seem to do okay. But it's also incredibly clear how sharply my mental processes drop off when I'm tired - I hit a wall last night toward the end of the dinner, and suddenly I couldn't follow anything that was being said at all. Which is quite a good incentive to get a lot of sleep, so I think I'll do that now and put off writing about today. This is quite long enough as it is.

I've really been very happy here so far, even with the frustrations. This is a good place.

More soon.

[Written last night, when I was sans internet.]

It turns out I was completely wrong about Anaïs - her English has improved hugely since the last time I saw her, and yesterday she was kind enough to humor me and speak it almost exclusively. She fumbles around for words sometimes, but she's easy to understand, and she very much puts my French to shame. After meeting me at the train station she took me to her parents' house, where I stayed when I visited Lyon before. It turned out that François had to be somewhere until later than I really wanted to stay awake, so I spent a very pleasant evening with Anaïs and her parents. They're some of my favorite people, really kind and welcoming, not to mention patient with my very halting French. Mrs. Bargel was an English major in college, so we can converse easily, which I very much appreciated in my jet-lagged state.

After dinner we watched the second half a two-part movie about, as far as I could tell, a woman named Diane who was a Catholic in love with a Protestant but married to a man who was plotting to kill Henry III, who was (as far as I can tell) in league with the Protestants and angry with the Pope. The Pope was allied, secretly and via some red-haired lady, with the king's brother François who kept trying to kill him and then crying and saying he was sorry when the king found out, and therefore being repeatedly imprisoned and then either escaping or being let out. There was also something about a plot that killed Diane's mother when Diane was still a child, which turned out to be suicide but which was still (for some reason) either her husband's or François' fault, or both. (It should be noted that I lost most of the first half's references to Diane by other characters, since I didn't realize that the French pronunciation sounds like "Jen." And also that I didn't see the actual first half of the movie at all.) Diane and her lover are attacked by a mystery knight who turns out to be her husband, who they kill. Everyone goes to the funeral, but he's not dead! He comes back all covered in blood and takes Diane away. Eventually the king goes to church, dressed only in a white robe and followed by an army of self-flagellants dressed in what I can only describe as KKK robes and hoods for reasons that utterly escaped me, where he is attacked by François' men. But not by François, because he is too busy shooing servants out of the throne room with motions that make him look like a crazy vulture, so that he may sit on the throne and cackle in private. But Diane's lover and some other guy ride to the rescue and save the king. Then they ride to save Diane, which works in the sense that they kill all her husband's men and then her husband, but fails in the sense that they both die too - the lover by first the husband's knife to the gut and then a bolt from François' crossbow. (Why was he there?It's a mystery.) The movie ends after a short series of vignettes in which the red-haired lady shatters everything in her cell and then cries, François is poisoned by Diane pretending to be a servant, and some other things happen that didn't make sense and I can't remember.

If that description seems long, rest assured that the movie seemed much, much longer.

This morning I slept til nearly noon, and thus refreshed, decided that I would give the whole French-speaking thing a go. I suppose I did better than yesterday (when I just didn't speak it), but not by very much. But Anaïs is patient and also doesn't mind when I revert to English, while also not liking English enough that she doesn't immediately go back to French, which is probably the best combination for me right now. We played with her rabbit Pitchou (that spelling is guesswork) and then had lunch with Mrs. Bargel, which was nice. Hot lunch is taken seriously here - it's either unhealthy or uncivilized or both to grab a sandwich or something, so there's always an actual meal. Both lunch and dinner seem to be followed by a choice of a cheese plate or yogurt and then tea (a selection), coffee or hot chocolate. Yogurt, incidentally, is a word that I can't seem to understand even when I am listening for it and know what is going to be said. "Yaourt" is pronounced, as near as i can tell, somewhere between "ya" and "yo."

Anaïs is having a dinner party tomorrow night, so we went shopping at Carrefour. You may remember it as the French department store that the Chinese were boycotting during the Olympics dustup with Sarkozy. I'm not completely sure whether it's a department store within a mall, or whether it is the mall. Basically it's a line of stores (jewelry store, cell phone store, Claire's, etc) inside a building, in front of what I can only describe as a French Fred Meyer's. For those of you who haven't been to the Pacific Northwest, Fred Meyer's is sort of like a Target, but bigger, and it also includes a full grocery store. They're huge and I don't like them because I always get lost, and any given thing is likely to be in one of several places. Today we spent a long time looking for a power adaptor for my laptop, and wandered around in both the computer section and the general electronics section (which had French-to-American ones, but not American-to-French) before we found them with the luggage after giving up and looking for picnic things. Anyway, my dislike of Fred Meyer is well known to my west-coast friends and had been joked about as one of the things I would miss very much when I went to France, and now the first thing I do in France is find a French equivalent. Go figure.

I finally made it over to François' after he got out of class around 7p. He's starting a two-year training program to become a police commissioner, which is less of a high position in the French system than in ours, but it's still really difficult to get - the school has about a 4% acceptance rate. He's more comfortable with English than his sister and less happy to slow down for me, which meant we spoke French for about three minutes, but I think that will change soon. We ate dinner and talked about American health care reform, the various meanings of "conservative" in France and the US, where I should start looking for an apartment and a few other things before he had to go back to school for a meeting, which apparently turned out to be a surprise party thrown by their teachers. I was pretty ready for some down time, so I read for a while, repacked my bags to be useful and now wrote this. And now it's time for bed.

I'm curious to know who's reading this. Leave a comment if you are - and also if this is tl;dr. I won't mind. :)

My last sixteen months have been pretty whirlwind, from UVA to Roanoke to Alaska to DC to Portland and back - and now, to France. I didn't fully realize until I spent the past few weeks at home how terrible I really have been about keeping in touch during that time (I heard a few variations of "Wait, you were in Portland?"), so here's an attempt to do something about that.

The Plan: Starting at the beginning of October, I'm going to be teaching English to middle school kids in Lyon at two different schools. Technically I'm a teacher's assistant, but there's no real way to know until I hear more from my schools (which might not be until orientation). Some assistants teach completely alone (mostly the ones with primary school kids), and some are essentially tutors for kids who are having a hard time (mostly high school), but there's a lot of flexibility within that and from what I can tell, schools do pretty much what they want. What I do know is that I shouldn't be working much more than twelve (as yet unspecified) hours a week, which leaves me free for things like learning French, exploring, getting a side job and generally making the most of being in a beautiful city.

So! Adventure, day 1. I flew into Paris this morning on a no-sleep red-eye, and after a few hazy hours alternately wandering around the train station and napping on my luggage, I'm writing on the train to Lyon. I'm not sure when I'll post this, since free wireless seems not to exist here as a concept - probably later tonight. Anyway, the kind I'm on is called the TGV, which translates to "Train of Great Speed." that makes me laugh, it sounds so pleased with itself. It's true, though - when I was here a couple years ago it was the world's fastest passenger train, and I think there might be one in Japan that's a little faster now, but it's still pretty sweet. It takes you from Paris to Lyon in two hours flat, which is hard to argue with.

While I apartment-hunt I'm staying with my friend François, who I met when he did an exchange year at UVA. He'll be at work when I get in, so his little sister Anaïs is picking me up at the station. That's both good and bad - I really like her and I'm excited to see her again, but unless things have changed in two years, she isn't any more excited about the idea of speaking English than I am about speaking French jet-lagged and two years out of practice. So in other words, her picking me up lowers my odds of being babied. Which I really can't complain about, since that's pretty much why I'm here.

So, the state of my French on day 1:
- I can read without much trouble. I don't get every word, but I almost always understand what's going on.
- I can write, mostly, although accents will still trip me up. (I can usually remember when there is one, but not always which it is.)
- I can understand what people say if they either slow down for me (hasn't happened today; airport workers are bilingual and prefer switching to English to using baby French) or if context gives me a good idea of what to listen for. Buying things tends to be a fairly scripted encounter ("what do you want? What kind? Okay, that's €__") so I do okay with it. What I'm not up to: Any spontaneous interaction of any kind, or any answer to a question that isn't one of the two or three I'm expecting and listening for.

So today I've mostly been thinking about the two things I know about language barriers, which are:
1) First it will be awful;
2) And then it will be fine.
I have at least two weeks of what I'm thinking of as disposable interactions - talking to people on the street or in shops who I'll most likely never see again, so I don't need to waste time caring if they think I'm an idiot for mangling things. Hopefully two weeks will be long enough for my ear to kick in, if not my vocab, and once that happens things should basically be fine.


Things on my short-term to do list:
- [Find out how, and] get a French cell phone
- [Find out how, and] get a French bank account
- Get in touch with someone who works in at least one of my schools, preferably before I show up for orientation
- Start looking around for longer-term housing
- And last on the list but probably (hopefully!) first to get done, buy one or more outlet converters.

That's it for now - laptop is low on juice and so am I.